Guide to Summer Camps

School may be out, but there are plenty of ways to keep your kids entertained thanks to the Tristate’s many summer camps

Menna Elarman

Looking for safe and fun places where you can leave your kids when school is out and you’re at work? What about activities that help keep your kids’ brains working during the break? There are plenty of options for families in the Tristate area.

“At Camp WAVE, we focus certainly on aquarium animals and science and engaging students with those topics,” says Erin Shultz, conservation education manager for the WAVE Foundation, which partners with the Newport Aquarium. “Students definitely gain an understanding of conservation and really how the ecosystems in our world work together and how animals in general, including ourselves, play a role in those ecosystems and how we as humans can be a positive impact on our global ecosystem.”

The WAVE Foundation, located within the Newport Aquarium, offers 10 weeklong summer camps where kids will meet stingrays, sharks and penguins from June 1 through Aug. 7 from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m.

According to Shultz, each week of the camp is a new experience, as the camp offers different themes and students are broken up into groups depending on their age group. For instance students are usually divided into two groups, with kindergarten to third grade in one group and fourth to eighth grade in the other.

To register for the WAVE Foundation summer camp, students are required to be in kindergarten through eighth grade. The camp is $200 per week for Aquarium members and $220 for non-members, though the Career Week camp is $225 for members and $245 for non-members.

The WAVE foundation offers high school students opportunities, too. “We have an opportunity for them to be junior camp counselors if they want to help us in a volunteer position,” adds Shultz.

If you’re looking for a camp in the Cincinnati area that is more history focused, the Cincinnati Museum Center at Union Terminal offers camps of all types, starting from four-day week camps—$200 for members and $230 for non-members—to full-week camps for $250 for members and $280 for non-members. Both camps run from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m., from May 26 to Aug. 7.

“CMC camps help [children] explore a subject that may not be part of school curriculum or not offered at their schools, such as archaeology or paleontology, medical science and those such things, that can help them explore a career field that they might be interested in later on,” says Whitney A. Owens, chief learning officer for the Cincinnati Museum Center.

The CMC camps have various locations in both Ohio and Kentucky including the Cincinnati Observatory, Villa Madonna Academy and Blue Ash Recreation Center, “to try and make them accessible for folks who live in different parts of the region,” says Owens.

If your kid loves science and experimenting with new stuff, Owens recommends having them try a CMC camp this summer as “each week is a little bit different, but all of them include a lot of hands-on activities so that kids can try things out, experiment with designing and making things, maybe having their designs fail so that they can try them again and bring home what they’ve made to the parents that week,” she says.